The mini-conference entitled “Romanian-Hungarian Relations in 1989” took place on May 25, 2022, organized by the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade (IFAT). The participants of the discussion were János Magdó, doctoral student at the National University of Public Services, and János T. Barabás, senior analyst at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade with Dr. Tamás Péter Baranyi, Deputy Director for Strategy at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade as moderator.
Romanian expert János T. Barabás explained that President Nicolae Ceaușescu had his stamp on Romanian-Hungarian bilateral relations in the 1980s, applying his own theory of national communism. The Romanian dictator considered himself an equal thinker with Marx and Lenin, his ideological invention was that if all people were equal in communism, the countries should be equal in international relations, and Bucharest would reject it if any foreign power wanted to dictate to Romania. In spite of his theories Ceausescu took unilateral steps to reduce bilateral relations, such as closing the consulate in Cluj-Napoca, accusing Hungary of revisionism, and increasing the repression of the Hungarian minority in Romania. To understand better Romanian nationalism we should know that Ceausescu cooperated with Italy-based Romanian businessman Iosif Constantin Drăgan who was treasurer of the Romanian fascist legionary movement between the two world wars, and left for Italy with his party’s assets in 1941. Drăgan organized and funded much of Western Romanian propaganda. The Romanian official ideology was given, but there was a lack of an economic basis for putting it into practice, which the Romanian regime made adventurous attempts to establish in the 1980s. By the end of the decade, unsuccessful modernization, Stalin-type repression, and controversial foreign policy had increasingly isolated Romania internationally: the U.S. withdrew its most favored nation status in trade; critical messages to Romania at the 1989 Socialist Camp meeting in Berlin and the November 3 Moscow Socialist Summit; at the Bush-Gorbachev meeting in Malta on November 1 the parties agreed to replace the Romanian regime. Mutual distrust in the Romanian top leadership contributed to the outbreak of the December 1989 revolution and coup.
In the summer of 1988, Mátyás Szűrös, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Hungarian Parliament, and Csaba Tabajdi the deputy head of the foreign affairs department of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist People’s Party, expressed concern about the events in Romania. The Romanian regime reacted harshly to this, stating that “irredenta” forces were attacking Romania. Romanian politics has not been able to undress itself from this communist-nationalist mentality until today.
Based on the documents sent home by the Hungarian Embassy in Bucharest, János Magdó addressed the issue of those fleeing from Romania to Hungary, which also caused a serious break between the two countries. In 1988, for example, 5,400 people came with a visa requested at the Bucharest embassy, 8,000 with tourist passports, and 6,400 fled. From the 6,400 prohibited crossings, 26 percent were returned to Romania by the Hungarian authorities. In Romania, Hungarian education was curtailed, all Hungarian schools were abolished, and they were made mixed language. The Romanian Communist authorities sent ethnic Hungarian youth to perform their compulsory military service out of Transilvania and the ethnic Hungarian university graduates were also sent to the Regat. The topic of Hungarian dissidents also came up. For example Szabolcs Lányi, a Hungarian chemical engineer living in Bucharest was brutally persecuted by the secret police, the securitate for keeping contact with the Hungarian embassy. An interesting historical addition is that six old Romanian communist cadres wrote a letter to Ceaușescu in March 1989, showing sharp criticism of the regime’s policies, demanding an end to the destruction of the villages and the restoration of constitutional rights. The story has a Hungarian thread, one of the six being Corneliu Mănescu, who began his diplomatic career as Romanian ambassador to Budapest and then became foreign minister and was forced into house arrest. Mănescut approached the Hungarian embassy to embrace his case and give him the opportunity to receive medical treatment in Hungary. The Hungarian Foreign Ministry sent an invitation letter, to which Mănescu did not respond at first, and then blamed the Hungarians to place him in the center of speculation, because he is healthy, well-off and loyal to the party.
János Magdó talked about the fact that the Romanian nuclear program had a basis, because they bought heavy water and plutonium from Norway and America, but they could not jump to the level to produce a bomb. The Romanians also wanted to produce a missile with the help of Arab countries, for which they would have fitted the nuclear charge. The Hungarian side was not worried about the Romanian nuclear threat, they realized Ceaușescu was bluffing.
János T. Barabás added that at the 1988 meeting in Arad, Ceaușescu told Károly Grósz Hungarian leader that Romania could produce an atomic bomb. Gross passed this information to Bonn, Washington, and Moscow. Ceaușescu bluffed, but he took seriously the need for Romania to have a strong strike force. In the 1990s, it was revealed that Ceaușescu was stationing Chinese medium-range missiles at the military base near Cluj-Napoca in December 1989. Romanian newspapers have repeatedly written that Ceaușescu intended to bomb the Hungarian Paks nuclear power plant with Chinese missiles in the event of a Romanian-Hungarian conflict.
Photos by: Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade (IFAT)